The Great Girona Gold Hunt

For someone with purported disdain for local programming I have found myself praising a number of BBC Northern Ireland’s programmes lately. I retain the right to spittle flecked apoplexy when ‘Have I Got News for You’ is replaced by ‘Good Dog Bad Dog’ or when a particularly good ‘Question Time’ panel is eschewed in favour of Daithi McKay, Dawn Purvis, Sean Neeson and Edwin Poots or an equally stellar selection of political thinkers on ‘Let’s Talk’. However I am quite prepared to fight the corner for local output when it is as good as Monday night’s documentary ‘The Great Girona Gold Hunt’.

As a child I visited the Girona treasures in the Ulster Museum. I was aware that the Spanish Armada ship had been wrecked somewhere close to Dunluce Castle in the autumn of 1588, but I had a number of misconceptions about the incident and I did not entirely understand the significance of this particular wreck until I watched the programme. It had been my understanding in fact that it was Dunluce that the Girona was attempting to reach on the fateful night when 1,300 on board lost their lives. I was also under the misapprehension that the ship was merely another Armada vessel of the many lost on the Irish coast that year. I did not appreciate that it represented a breakthrough in naval technology, or that the ship’s passengers were the surviving elite knights of Spain’s nobility.

The documentary fascinatingly outlined the ship’s attempted flight to Scotland (not to refuge with the Catholic McDonnell family of Dunluce Castle as I had believed), its wreck at Port na Spaniagh (pictured) near the Giant’s Causeway and the subsequent discovery of the same wreck by Belgian diver Robert Stenoit. It made sense of a great deal of folklore from the North Coast and the Glens of Antrim. The McDonnells had reputedly taken in 5 surviving Spaniards who had escaped the wreck, but their prime contribution was to loot enough gold to build the Elizabethan manor house at the castle, and obfuscate the actual location of the ship’s demise.

The Belgian team were to extrapolate clues and eventually found the treasure, but the unsung hero of the episode was Laurence Flannigan who negotiated for their finds to remain in Northern Ireland. His legacy is that the most important collection of Armada treasure is situated in Belfast, a fact which surely would be more worthwhile as a sales pitch to tourists, rather than encouraging them to take bus-trips around our most deprived areas gawking at murals.

The documentary is available on I Player.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I agree with much of this persons comments but would urge anyone who enjoyed the programme to get a copy of " Treasures of the Armada" by Robert Stenuit the diver who discovered the wreck. This hidden gem of a book covers things in a lot more detail and fleshes out the events with more facts from the excavation and possible events from the sinking.
Not sure the Girona was a breakthrough in Naval architecture though. Perhaps for Mediterranean seas but not the Atlantic, a condition which applied to many of the boats in the armada . Also recommend the Armada museum in Derry where many artifacts from another wreck the "Trinidad Valencera " are to be found. This ship sank in Kinnego bay , Donegal far away from the seas where it was designed to plough its trade.
29 May 2008 at 23:03
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more